YUCAIPA >> Apart from the rain, Friday was a typical summer day for three teenage friends — until they heard cries for help.

After taking a swim, Justin French, Austin Chaffins and Cole Erautt, all 17, went for a walk to check out water rushing through a flood-control channel and crossing over the 33000 block of Avenue D near Chaffins’ home.

In the channel on the south side of the road, a middle-age homeless couple were struggling to escape the quick-moving and rapidly rising water.

“There’s hobos in there. We got to go save them,” Chaffins recalled saying at the time, as he retraced their actions a day later while standing on the bank of the now mostly dry channel. “So we ran in here,” he said Saturday.

The boys jumped into the waist-high water from the street, navigating submerged rocks and brush to the middle of the channel where the couple had erected a tent.